The Heart Healers by James Forrester Read Free Book Online Page B

Exhilaration. He had saved a young man who otherwise would have died. Relief. He had overcome a moment of panic. Vindication. He had proven his skeptics wrong. If he allowed his imagination to roam more broadly, he might even imagine that he had created a brand-new phrase for Webster’s dictionary: “cardiac surgeon.”
    Yet as he stripped off his surgical gloves, even Harken could hardly have imagined how history would revere this day. It was the day of the largest amphibious invasion in world history, when 195,700 Allied personnel in over 5,000 ships landed on a fifty-mile stretch along the beaches of the Normandy coast. It was D-day. Like twins, the turning point of World War II and cardiac surgery would have the same birth date. The world could resist the Nazi army, but not the idea whose time had come. As Walter Cronkite, the great newscaster of the outset of this era, liked to remark: “What sort of a day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times.”
    Harken had discovered an unprecedented, lifesaving strategy. In retrospect, I have wondered if he succeeded where others failed because of his instantaneous decision to use two strategies to prevent his sutures from cutting through the muscle with each heartbeat. First, he used “swedges,” tiny cloth rolls wedged between the silk sutures and the heart muscle that prevented the sutures from cutting. Second Harken deliberately tied his sutures, as Ludwig Rehn had, during the split second when the heart relaxed and reached its largest volume, so that the heart’s alternating expansion and contraction did not place extra stress on the sutures.
    Harken, like Rehn half a century before him, understood the implications of his success. Unlike Rehn, however, he took the next step. Over the ensuing months he removed shrapnel from the hearts of sixteen soldiers. Not a single soldier died.
    Harken informed the world of his stunning success in the American Heart Journal in July 1946. The first sentence of his twenty-page manuscript speaks to the future by recalling the past. Harvard academician to the core, he quotes the Greeks: “Aristotle wrote, ‘The heart alone of all viscera cannot withstand serious injury.’” Harken added quotes from Billroth and Paget before proceeding to demolish them with compelling photographs and graphs. On that muggy July day, an idea that stood sacrosanct for two millennia, “Do not touch the heart,” vanished from medicine. Of the Nazi shrapnel lodged in the hearts of young soldiers, the trigger of cardiology’s first great turning point in the battle with heart disease, it could be said, “although man meant it for evil, God meant it for good.”
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    WHY HAD HARKEN succeeded where other surgeons, including his contemporaries, failed? What was the source of Harken’s intuition, his genius, his sixth sense? In his contemporary bestseller Outliers Malcolm Gladwell proposes that the person the world sees as an innovative genius is instead often the product of vast experience. Gladwell points to the Beatles’ thousands of hours performing in Hamburg, Germany beer halls before they exploded on the world of music, and to Bill Gates’s years of writing computer programs in high school at the dawn of the digital era. Could Harken’s innovative genius be one more example? Every textbook that relates the history of cardiac surgery describes Dwight Harken’s brilliant burst of innovative genius but in none have I found the tale that Harken told his friends.
    Prior to the United States’s entry into World War II, Harken had been trying to develop a method for removing bacterial infections from the surface of heart valves in the Harvard animal research laboratory. Pathologists, with their penchant for conflating the grisly with the edible, call these infections vegetations. They appear as soft mounds of clotted blood and bacteria attached to the heart valves. Cardiac pathologists have